1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a fleet management system and method for managing a fleet of vehicles.
2. Related Art
Fleet management is required in many businesses, such as limousine, trucking, and taxi businesses. The current management systems are not able to track vehicle or chauffeur status in real-time. Driver time-sheets are managed based on honesty, which means either business owner writes fixed hours for drivers or drivers record their working hours by themselves. Either of the two ways may lead to over or under paying drivers, which may lead to unnecessary expense or lawsuits for underpaying employees for business owners.
The current management systems cannot raise alerts automatically before chauffeurs or other drivers reach scheduled pick up locations if any emergencies happen, for example, if a chauffeur oversleeps or encounters bad traffic, or even accidents. The emergencies are often noticed when passengers complain to customer services that the chauffeur or driver did not show up on time. Without pre-emptive action on emergencies, such situations may often lead to poor customer satisfaction, refusal of payment or even compensations to the customers.
Another problem with many current fleet management systems is that they cannot enforce Geo-fencing (meaning enforcing affiliates business territories), which may cause unfair job dispatch. This often leads to bad and unnecessary competition among affiliates and service delay due to over/under estimate on affiliates' capacity.
Many current management systems cannot track vehicle status on battery, mileage, engine, brakes, gas, and the like in real-time, which may cause skips of scheduled maintenance or check-ups and undetected deliberated abuse of vehicles from unhappy employees. This often leads to very expensive and unnecessary vehicle repairs. In some cases, vehicle leases expire with low mileage due to unawareness of mileage usage on each of the vehicles in the fleet.
Current fleet management systems often require chauffeurs to be on the phone for status updates, directions, or urgent requests, which may cause potential hazard due to the distraction and may lead to traffic tickets/fines due to government regulation on cell phone usage while driving.